Vienna names an institute for Mahler’s tragic niece
NewsThe former Josef Hellmesberger Institut für Streichinstrumente, Gitarre und Harfe in der Musikpädagogik at Vienna’s University of Music has been renamed the Alma Rosé Institute for Stringed Instruments, Guitar and Harp in Music Education.
‘I am extremely pleased that for the first time in more than 200 years of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, an institute has been named in honour of an important female artist,” said Rector Ulrike Sych.
Alma Rosé, daughter of the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Arnold Rosé and Mahler’s sister Justine, conducted a womens’ orchestra in the 1930s.
Captured by the Nazis in France, she led a women’s orchestra in Auschwitz, where she died in April 1944, aged 37, of undetermined causes.
Hellmesberger, whom she has displaced, was a ballet conductor at the Vienna Opera who was picked by the Vienna Philharmonic as a replacement after they fired Gustav Mahler in 1900.
In fairness to Hellmesberger Jr. he was scion to one of the greatest names in Viennese musical history, going back to the time of Beethoven: solo and quartet violinists, conductors, and composers, as well as teachers and professors. The last great musician in the family, the cellist Ferdinand, died in 1940.
I am not suggesting naming the Institute after Alma is a mistake or an injustice, just that Hellmesberger Jr’s resume was more interesting and significant than the brief mention above would suggest.
And in one of those interesting coincidences, when Alma Rosé and her father Arnold recorded the Bach Double Violin Concerto, they included a cadenza (!!) for the last movement composed by Hellmesberger Sr. That is the stature the Hellmesberger name had in Vienna into the 20th century.
Seems a great move in more ways; from Carl Flesch, Lebenserinnerungen ( by heart, why can’t I find my books when I need them ) :
” The two things Hellmesberger hated most were young talents and Jews. I happened to be both….”
Carl Flesch was referring to Hellmesberger Sr. — not the Hellmesberger after whom the Institut had been named.
Curiously, Hellmesberger Sr’s own father, Georg was the pupil of one great Jewish violinist (Joseph Böhm) and teacher of another (Joseph Joachim, who had also studied with Böhm).
100% in agreement with this name change.
Wokeism and empty measures such as this one are rampant at MDW since Ulrike Sych is Rektorin.